adding insult to injury

Jaguars are cool

I’m certain all of you have been dieing to know what I thought of the recently announced “late summer” upgrade to the Mac OS, Mac OS X v 10.2 – codename Jaguar. (I know you really haven’t but that’s just too bad, I’m going to tell you anyway)

Many things about Jaguar are going to be very cool, and at the very least good foundations. The bad news included within all the good is iChat. It looks ugly as sin and only works only with AIM – at least my avatar will come in handy. I though Apple would go for something along the lines of Fire, but I’m guessing someone’s pockets got lined by AOL or visa versa for Apple to pair up with them. I don’t think that people want cartoon thought bubbles to distinguish between speakers in a room. It looks fine for 2 people, but imagining 3 or 4 people is atrocious. I’m sure they will do something about it, but in the meantime – ugh.

Fortunatally, the good news for Jaguar far outweighs the bad bulky chat program. Quartz Extreme hardware acceleration is a godsend. For those of you who don’t know, this screen-drawing engine will use Open GL graphics drivers ( nVidia cards) to draw what’s on the screen rather than the G4 CPU. If you were to drag a window in the current version of OS X, the CPU hits 100% instantly (at least on my PowerBook G3/500). With Quarts Extreme the CPU can do all the tough/useful computations and the graphics card can chomp through the screen rendering – rather than sitting, waiting for you to play Quake. I’m guessing that will make the interface seem much faster.

Sherlock 3 looks a little too similar to Watson, but Watson is $30 and Sherlock comes with OS X. It gives you the ability to search movie times, flights, maps, yellow pages, and online stores from within the OS in a very user-friendly manner. I hope it works through our proxy server.

Finally I’d like to point out Inkwell. It’s the name a the new handwriting recognition software built into OS X. It requires a tablet currently, but I can see this being built into a tablet based mac. It was built from the Newton code, which was very good.

That’s all I’m going to talk about, but trust me – there is a lot lot more.